Chapter 10 Baz
My mother’s kitchen smells like decades of my life, and I stand in the doorway of it like a salesman, because I have a speech prepared and everything.
Today I have to ask for the actual reason I flew home for a few days, and the actual reason is in the cabinet under the window, where it has lived my whole life, black and heavy and older than everyone I love.
“You’re staring at the cabinet,” Mère says. She doesn’t turn around from the stove. She has never once needed to turn around to see me. “Bastian, honey. Tell me.”
The speech I prepared had structure. It had an opening about family, a middle section about tradition, and a big finish. I stood in an airport for two hours building it. Now I’m in the actual kitchen with the smell of her roux and every word of it is gone.
“I need the pot,” I say.
Mère turns around.
Not the everyday pots. She knows that. The pot.
Her mother’s gumbo pot. Cast iron, seasoned by forty years of Cajun cooking.
The one that made the Friday étouffée for the whole street.
The one nobody touches without washing up first. The one that came off the flame the day her mama died and sat cold for a month because Mère couldn’t.
That pot. In this family, you don’t ask for that pot.
In this family, that pot is like a person.
“For the boy,” Mère says.
“For Tikhon.”
She wipes her hands on the towel. Takes her time about it.
My mother has known about me, and about him, since a phone call in March.
Forty minutes of me talking around a name before she finally said, honey, what is his name?
That was me telling her everything. That was her hearing all of it.
She has never met him. She knows what he does to me inside. Mothers.
“Tell me why,” she says. Not a test. An opening. She wants to hear me say it out loud, because she knows I build things by saying them.
“Because everyone on the team gets a day with the Cup, and everyone’s taking it to their homes.
Chicago, Winnipeg, Jersey, wherever. And Tikh’s home is…
” I look at the window. The one with the too-narrow sill.
“He can’t take it home to Russia, Ma. It’s not safe to be him there.
And since he can’t go home, I’m building him one. From parts.”
The kitchen hums. The roux keeps its own counsel.
“And the pot is a part,” she says.
“The pot’s the foundation. You can’t build a home out of a backdrop and a cake, Ma, you need something with weight in it.
Something that’s been in a family so long it doesn’t remember being new.
” I hear how quickly Louisiana has come back into my voice and I let it.
“I’m going to cook for him out of it, and then I’m going to tell him it’s part of our home now.
Because that’s what it means. You don’t borrow that pot and give it back. You commit to it.”
My mother looks at me for a long moment. Then she opens the cabinet, and she lifts her mother’s pot with both hands and the little grunt she’d deny, and she sets it on the counter between us.
“You wash it with no soap,” she says, her accent just as thick as mine. “You dry it on the flame. You tell him my mama fed the whole bayou out of this thing and never once asked anybody what they were before they sat down.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“And you’re taking étouffée for the plane. Don’t argue.”
I wasn’t going to argue. I’m not a fool.
There’s one more stop. Tante Cece’s. Ten minutes away, a house I’ve been to a thousand times.
I stand on her porch and ask for something.
The sea-glass jar. The one from Ma’s old windowsill, the one I grew up counting colors in.
Cece looks at me suspiciously, because in this family suspicion is a love language, and then she goes and gets it.
It’s smaller than I remember. Everything from that kitchen is.
“Your mama know you’re taking that?”
“It’s going somewhere good, Tante. Windowsill’s already picked out.”
“Whose windowsill?”
“Mine. Ours.”
“Hm,” she says and nods, which in this family is a notarized release form.
The flight home, I buy the pot its own seat.
I’m not putting my grandmother in an overhead bin, I tell the gate agent, and the gate agent, a professional, does not ask a single follow-up question.
The pot rides next to me in 14B with the seatbelt through its handles and the jar packed in my carry-on in four shirts, and somewhere over Alabama I text Sadie the picture.
Pot’s coming home. Phase one complete.
you bought it a SEAT
she’s family
you’re going to make me cry at work. also I’m coming to the photo thing. that’s not a question.
Never was, cher. Never was.
I call Tishka when I land. I call walking up the jet bridge, phone against my ear, pot in my arms like a baby.
“You landed?” he says. His phone voice. Flat to strangers. Not to me. It hasn’t been flat to me since January.
“Landed.”
“Good. The Bugs destroyed the paper towels. I did not stop them. It was a coordinated operation.” A pause. Behind him I can hear the sounds of our building, our floor, our kitchen. “What were you doing in Louisiana, Bastian?”
“Picking something up for the weekend,” I say, deflecting for the umpteenth time he’s tried to get this out of me. “You’ll see.”
“I don’t like surprises.”
“You love me. You’ll love this.”
Silence. The specific silence of a man refusing to confirm the truth. I grin all the way to baggage claim.
Everyone else gets to have their day how they want, usually at where they consider home.
And that’s right, and I’d never take it from any of them.
Lundy took his to his dad’s place in Chicago.
Avi wrote down his own address. Even Berger’s taking his to an island, and no, we don’t have details.
Tikh watched the schedule go around in June with his face doing nothing.
Only three people alive can read that nothing. Two of them are cats.
You can’t fly a Cup to Saint Petersburg. Fine. Noted. Logged.
Watch what I build instead.